Lightyear One is a solar-powered car with an eye-watering price
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Ever wanted to own an
that can charge itself? Soon, that could be a very real possibility. Dutch clean mobility company
today debuted its long-range prototype, the Lightyear One, with a range of 725 km (450 miles) and a battery that can be charged directly via sunlight, or from
conventional charging stations
.
The idea is that you could take the car on long
because it supposedly isn’t dependent on charging infrastructure the way that traditional
are.
[Though the trickle of energy this thing gets from the sun isn’t nearly enough to have us at
Autoblog
convinced of such. —Ed.]
The roof and hood of the car are covered with five square meters of
cells beneath safety glass, which the company claims is “so strong that a fully-grown adult can walk on them without causing dents.” And it is designed to be very lightweight, making it more power efficient.
Less weight means you get better range from conventional charging too, so the car can be charged for up to 400 km (nearly 250 miles) in one night from a regular 230V socket. The solar panels add an additional charge of up to 12 km/hour (7.5 miles/hour).
Lightyear is a relatively new company, created in 2016. Its founders developed a solar-powered car — named
— for the
in
while they were at university and became the world champion in their class. They went on to create the Lightyear company to manufacture and sell similar vehicles on a larger scale. The One is the company’s first production model.
The Lightyear One certainly doesn’t come cheap, however. The reservation fee for one of the first 500 cars is a hefty €119,000, equivalent to $151,000, and delivery isn’t expected until 2021.
This makes the Lightyear more of a purchasable
than a production vehicle. But if you’ve got a spare few hundred thousand dollars lying around and you want to help Lightyear publicly test their first production car, now you have another option for environmentally friendly transport.
Reporting by Georgina Torbet for Engadget
.
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June 26, 2019 at 07:13AM